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2005 06 21

Toronto’s best kept secret

It follows that if you read on the World Wide Web about a thing called “a best kept secret”, then that thing is no longer a secret. With this in mind, I decided to peruse via the Web some of the things or places purported to be Toronto’s best kept secrets. A keyword search for "Toronto's best kept secret" yielded 434 results. I’ve randomly picked 24, listed alphabetically below.

Conclusions drawn: “best kept secret” is an often dubious distinction, shared mostly by inns, “escorts” and obscure musical acts. According to several websites, Toronto is itself “Canada’s best kept secret.”

People like secret places - there’s a guidebook called Secret Toronto, http://www.secretguides.com/secret_toronto.html which offers a selection of secret Toronto places, such as the Art Deco R.C. Harris Filtration Plant, but then none of its offerings are purported to be “best kept”. The most intrepid of the explorers of secret places call themselves infiltrators, and visit “areas not designed for public usage, going places you’re not supposed to go” http://www.infiltration.org

But to return to the hyperbole “best kept secrets”, can the findings below be seen as a kind of reading of the tea leaves of the city? And if so, what are they telling us?